Headline roundups published weekdays. Beacon clippings published Mondays, Wednesdays, & Fridays. Weekly original article ☆ published Wednesdays. American classics published on Thursdays. Other clippings, quotes & updates published irregularly on weekdays as time and circumstances permit.

“Chris Pope joins John Stossel to talk about the debate over single-payer health care—a system in which the federal government would assume all health-care costs currently borne by private insurers, employers, and individuals.

Momentum for single-payer is growing among Democratic politicians. Senator Bernie Sanders’s “Medicare for All” proposal would impose $32 trillion in new costs over ten years and a likely annual tax increase of $26,000 per American household. It’s hard to imagine that Congress would adopt massive federal tax increases and rationing of health-care services, but incremental proposals, such as Medicaid buy-in and strict price controls, could be on the horizon if Democrats capture the White House in 2020 and do well in the congressional elections.

Advocates for single-payer health care point to European countries with generous social-welfare systems as evidence of its success. They don’t acknowledge the fact that Germany and France, like the United States, have private and employer-funded health insurance, in addition to government programs for the poor. In the meantime, U.S. lawmakers continue to ignore reforms—like eliminating barriers to hospital competition—that would probably be more effective in improving America’s health-care system.”

““That idea—that the presumption of innocence, fundamental to common law, should be suspended for accusations of sexual assault—has been the cornerstone of the campus-rape bureaucracy; during the Kavanaugh hysteria, that conceit jumped out of the ivory tower into the world at large. It will be no easy task to put it back. In preparation for the next Salem witch trial-like ordeal, therefore, it is worth empirically rebutting the #BelieveSurvivors mandate, as well as its corollary: the claim that if most self-professed rape survivors in our patriarchal culture don’t report their assaults, that’s because the “social and emotional” costs are too high, as California congressman Ted Lieu explained on MSNBC last Sunday.””— Heather Mac Donald

“City Journal contributing editor John Tierney joins John Stossel to talk about the politicization of science and how the dominance of left-wing thinkers in academia and the scientific community impedes progress.”

““Any article that so badly mischaracterizes the state of knowledge on an issue as contentious as climate science should have been rejected for publication. New York magazine should be posting corrections, not tallying clicks.”” — Oren Cass